Every time a Muslim commits murder in the name of Islam, the denial
begins again: Western leaders and the mainstream media tie themselves
into knots trying to explain what happened without making any
reference to its guiding motivation.

Last week was no different: Muhammad Merah was a self-styled "Islamic
warrior" who killed a rabbi and several children at a Jewish day
school in Toulouse, France, in an attack that the international media
widely reported initially as having been perpetrated by a neo-Nazi.
When it became clear that Merah was actually a jihadist, the
predictable denial began: French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that
the attack had nothing to do with Islam, and the call echoed
worldwide not to allow the murders to harm French "pluralism."

In fact, however, Muhammad Merah´s murders had everything to do with
Islam: he claimed affiliation with al-Qaeda and may have trained with
the Taliban, both of which are explicitly and ostentatiously Muslim
groups that justify all their actions by reference to the Qur´an and
Sunnah. He claimed to be a mujahid, which is a warrior of jihad,
which is an Islamic theological and legal concept. He killed Muslim
soldiers who fought in the infidel military -- something that only
someone who considered one´s loyalty to the umma to trump all other
loyalties would have done.

Indeed, so grounded is Merah´s massacre in Islam that it is virtually
inconceivable that he would have carried it out had he not been a
Muslim. And so Sarkozy is, like every other leader in the Western
world today, whistling in the dark, trying to pretend that there is
no problem when there is a huge problem, and basing the future of his
nation on the fantasy that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in
France do not believe the same things Muhammad Merah believed.

Meanwhile, Sarkozy announced that he is going to make habitually
visiting jihadi websites a crime. But as long as Sarkozy and the
French establishment continues in denial about the nature, source and
magnitude of the threat, monitoring websites may stop a few jihad
attacks, but it will do nothing to stop the Islamization of French
society by gradual capitulation to Sharia demands. The hijab ban was
one step to prevent that, but Sarkozy is going to have to be prepared
to be much more "implacable in defending our values," as he declared
he would be in the wake of Merah´s massacre, than he has been up to
now, if he is really serious about doing so.

The denial continues on other fronts as well. The leader of the
French Muslim Council, Mohammed Moussaoui, asserted that Merah
actually misunderstood the religion to which he had dedicated his
life and for which he was fighting: "These acts are in total
contradiction with the foundations of this religion," he
said. "France´s Muslims are offended by this claim of belonging to
this religion."

Offended? Muhammad Merah himself is responsible for any claim that
his murders had anything to do with Islam, but Moussaoui´s strange
statement is not just an attempt to distance Islam from Merah´s
massacre: Moussaoui´s words here are consistent with the general
tendency of Muslim leaders to pretend that the connection between
Islam and jihad violence is being made by non-Muslim analysts, not by
the jihadists themselves.

Also, if it is really true that Merah´s "acts are in total
contradiction with the foundations of this religion," what is
Mohammed Moussaoui doing in mosques in France to make sure that more
Muslims there don´t misunderstand Islam in the same way that Muhammad
Merah did? In fact, no Muslim community in any Western country has
any such program or activity -- nothing at all to fight in mosques
and madrassas against this disturbingly pervasive understanding of
Islam that they insist is in error.

One can only conclude that Muslim leaders don´t do anything serious
against this understanding of Islam because they don´t really think
it "contradicts Islam" at all. Western authorities, including Nicolas
Sarkozy, should act accordingly. But they won´t, of course. They will
take Mohammed Moussaoui´s words at face value and go away confirmed
in their complacency.